Clash of the Clouds - Datacenter Madness
I had the honor of being part of Actual Tech Media's Datacenter Madness webinar series. The series was also sponsored by Nutanix and Intel. As part of the Nutanix Technology Champions program, I was asked by Angelo Luciani if I wanted to participate. I had to jump at the chance to participate in my first webinar after many years speaking live at VMUG events. My segment of the 4 part webinar was a discussion on On Premises versus Hosted Datacenter deployments. Below are the notes from my answers, as well as some of the links to the studies I mentioned in the webinar.
On premises vs. Hosted Deployments
Speakers: Stephen Foskett and Paul Woodward, Jr.
Are IT teams playing a home or away game? We’ll explore whether
cloud will be a logical extension to on-prem data centers as it is in
personal devices (iPhone to iCloud and Android to Gdrive) with
seamless cloud extensions, or if organizations move to a cloud-first
world where most of their workloads sit in either a hosted private or the public cloud.
(This first comparison isn’t on-prem versus public, but on-prem versus hosted [both being private]. We can extend it to be public too, but that is part two.)
How much non-IT sanctioned application activity do you think is taking place in the typical enterprise?
2013 study - 200 businesses
7 of 10 organizations utilizing unsanctioned cloud services
71% utilize something like Gmail or Dropbox to get work done despite it not being approved by IT
77% predicted an increase in their use of cloud services
2015 Gartner study said they anticipated 35% of IT expenditure to be on shadow IT services
2015 Brocade survey - 83% of CIOs report seeing some sort of unauthorized IT services in use
http://www.itproportal.com/2015/11/20/why-shutting-down-shadow-it-stifles-innovation/
http://converge.xyz/2016-the-state-of-shadow-it/
http://www.itp.net/603235-unauthorised-cloud-adoption-growing-issue-for-cios
Are companies really trying to get out of the data center business or are they just seeking more efficient ways to operate these environments?
The bottom line rules us all, it is to operate in a more cost efficient way
Same 2013 study - top answer for cloud migration was due to cost reduction
2015 Brocade survey - 90% of those CIOs surveyed had adopted some piece of cloud computing / As a Service offering
What role do cloud service providers play versus the public cloud providers?
Smaller, more localized
In some cases, you can actually tour these facilities
Better working relationship with the provider
Allude to the concept of managed services and infrastructure hosting / collocation.
Managed services is a great example, I worked for a managed services provider that offered a private cloud service.
Many small/medium sized businesses can offload some, if not all of their infrastructure to those sites
No need to keep up with hardware maintenance, patching, and updates
Who do you think enterprise IT pros and risk managers trust more – local IT security experts or vendors or cloud service providers security staff?
Working for a vendor, we see a lot of companies reaching out to us for our expertise
It takes time to build that trust relationship
With local experts, they generally know the risk profile of the local community, and have a better feel for risk tolerance of an individual organization that they know personally.
It depends on the enterprise - does the org trust IT and see value in their IT?
If, so I would assume that they would trust their local IT more, and use the vendor to keep them in check
Otherwise, if they don't trust IT, they would definitely trust the vendor more
As I work for a vendor, we do see a lot of organizations coming to us for our expertise. That being said, it varies greatly from business to business. Some businesses have lost trust in their local IT departments, and with many high profile hacking cases in the news lately, some companies still do not trust a provider to protect their data
How do the economics play out for on-prem deployment versus service providers versus cloud
What does your company value more - OpEx reduction or CapEx reduction
Going to the cloud means you're investing less in hardware up front
Cloud is also just leasing space, your cost remains the same or goes up versus a one time purchase
If you'd like to join in the conversation, or be a guest on my podcast, reach out to me on Twitter or email me!
